Sunday, September 07, 2014

Unfortunately EU4 does not make it easy to run multiple major mods together (to be fair, pretty much no game does, good support for a single mod at a time is already pretty good).

This could always be achieved with manually merging files, and some people did just that, but that's fairly tedious, especially to update it every single time new version comes out. Even for vanilla Fun and Balance it was a bit of a chore to update it for every EU4 hotfix.

This isn't completely trivial, since some things that make sense in vanilla don't make sense in mods, but progress from applying hundreds of edits with text editors (and hoping I made no typos on the way) to just selecting which mod I want as base, and which features I want to include with a script like this is an amazing improvement.

holy site system (this could totally work, I'd just need to go through all of mod's religions and select good holy sites for them)

advisor cost increase slowdown (already rebalanced by mod to support playing up to 9999)

Technical notes

Because of the way EU4 loads mods alphabetically, mod name " Fun and Balance for Extended Timeline" starts with a space so it can override files in "Extended Timeline" mod.

Automated build process throws away all comments and formatting in affected files (except defines.lua where it keeps them). I want to make it smarter, so it only does that in changed portions of a file instead of entire file, but that's future work.

Building Fun and Balance versions for other mods - or customizing version of the mod for your experience - is now relatively straightforward - especially if you know a little Ruby.

Build system is not Fun and Balance specific in any way - it could easily be used for other mods, it could probably even be used with other Clausewitz engine games with minor modifications.

If there's any other mod you want to use with Fun and Balance, but you don't know how to use build system, feel free to ask me and I'll take a look.

My software

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Unless otherwise expressly stated, all original material of whatever nature created by Tomasz Węgrzanowski and included in this blog, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. It is also licensed under GFDL (for Wikipedia compatibility).